Although the demand for printing electronic documents (EDs) is decreasing because of recent improvements in computer displays, there are still those who generate hardcopies of EDs for purposes of reading the EDs. For example, some readers may simply prefer reading a hardcopy over staring at a computer screen. In other instances, hardcopies of the EDs may be provided to a group of people at an informal presentation, or in other situations where reading from a projector screen or computer display is not convenient.
An ED may specify any number of pages having one or more text streams. Further, each text stream may have any number of lowercase and upper characters. Further still, the ED may specify the requested font for displaying/printing the ED. It is the responsibility of a layout engine on a Page Rendering Device (PRD) or user machine to layout the text streams in the document as specified by the ED.
Even though an ED may specify a requested font for a text stream, the layout engine of the PRD might not support the requested font. For example, the requested font may be a rare font or an expensive font. If the PRD attempts to use a substitute font for the text stream when rendering the ED, layout problems are likely to exist. For example, a text stream that was originally intended to fit on a single line may be partitioned across multiple lines in the rendered page/document. Regardless, users still like specifying requested fonts that might not be supported by many PRDs.